I’ve read somewhere that the massive explosion in popularity happened in 2020 when someone stole and cloned the PCs that were used to install the ROMs on Android phones. By then GrapheneOS head dev’s conflict with CopperheadOS team was very widely publicized and GrapheneOS’s security debate was impossible to miss.
Anyway, here’s a phone and a messaging app that will only be provided to you and other criminals, it is very secure
I always wondered why anyone would choose to use that instead of Signal and GrapheneOS. I mean, removing cameras and microphones is a great tactic, but why use some shady software instead of something that was proven to work many times? Even if that service was authentic, how long would it take for law enforcement to learn about it, seize the servers and collect metadata? There must be people who are competent in tech and also happen to be cartel members.
haha, none at all! I’ve spent like 6 months trying to boot normal NixOS instead of mobile-nixos, got it booting last week, almost nothing works, currently I’m trying to build a newer kernel and maybe fix sound.
I quite like the boot chain that I achieved (bootloader -> tianocore EDK II UEFI from Renegade Project -> normal systemd-boot) and I also installed the whole thing via USB by mounting disks directly.
On Mobian I think at least one camera did work but was purple all over, never actually tested the hardware on android.
All mobile distributions ship without kernel modules that I need, compiling manually on every update is not really sustainable, this is the reason why my setup is so convoluted.
Yes, I mean the 2018 era SDM845 bunch of phones. They mostly work. While postmarketOS is the community that made linux on phones possible, it is not the only thing that you can run on these, there is actual choice. I personally liked Mobian very much.
Making linux phones more widely adopted will require wider community interest and halium is just not the way forward.
Edit: screenshot to illustrate my point, my OnePlus 6T running NixOS in UEFI mode (based on this writeup by /u/chayleaf@lemmy.ml:
why? why is this thing being posted so much everywhere?
linux phone
actually halium
hardware kill switches
I guess I just can’t see the utility vs leaving the phone at home since I don’t arrange 3AM deals by the docks
android app support
all we see is a shaky recording of a screen that looks like some gui to control waydroid settings
we have actual hardware now that works really well, has almost mainline linux kernel support, does not rely on oem hacks and proprietary blobs on top of android kernels to be useful, and is available now for $50 second hand in good condition
installing and setting up every month is a bit of a pain
Repent of your sins and turn away from imperative ways, for the Kingdom of Reproducibility is at hand. Convert your heart to NixOS and accept Its grace; this is not a suggestion, but a command for your eternal soul.
I got mine used from a local ebay-like site. Can’t really justify buying new hardware most of the time. Thinkpads in general are really easy to buy second-hand in great condition when corporations replace them. Z-series were not very popular so getting it was a lot harder than a T14 or P1, but still, there were some great options.
I actually bought the Z16 just a few months ago to replace my aging 16" Intel MBP - I wanted good linux support, type-c charging, normal keyboard and a 16" 4k OLED screen, nothing new seemed to be comparable.
If you absolutely need something new, notebookcheck has a pen support filter in their search. Just look for laptops without Nvidia GPUs and maybe check Arch wiki (they have device specific pages) or hardware probes on linux-hardware.org. New hardware generally has worse linux support that improves over time.
What kind of vendor support do you need? Unless you buy something esoteric (like the surfaces suggested in the thread, where specific downstream linux kernel patches are required to make it work) all firmware is already backed into mainline linux kernel and it just works right out of the box.
I daily drive a thinkpad Z16 gen 2, which is basically a more modern/macbooky X1 Extreme with AMD, it ticks all your boxes:
Oh wait, I remembered an idiotic thing: while stylus is supported, max display lid angle is about 135°, this does not make this a great drawing tablet and might be a deal breaker for you. The screen does not wobble though and I can somewhat comfortably draw on my slides with a pen.
if you already have an esim on the phone it will not be wiped during installation - esims reside on a completely separate chip.
all “difficult to set up” information is exactly about that - setting up, that, in any case, is just about enabling specific google services that you can disable afterwards.
my phone has about 5 esims installed, I regularly wipe my phone, they are unaffected.